The community notes observatory: Can crowdsourced fact-checking be trusted in practice?

Fact-checking is an important tool in fighting online misinformation. However, it requires expert human resources, and thus does not scale well on social media because of the flow of new content. Crowdsourcing has been proposed to tackle this challenge, as it can scale with a smaller cost, but it has always been studied in controlled environments. In this demo, we present the Community Notes Observatory, an online system to evaluate the first large-scale effort of crowdsourced fact-checking deployed in practice. We let demo attendees search and analyze tweets that are fact-checked by Community Notes users and compare the crowd’s activity against professional fact-checkers. The attendees will explore evidence of i) differences in how the crowd and experts select content to be checked, ii) how the crowd and the experts retrieve different resources to fact-check, and iii) the edge the crowd shows in fact-checking scalability and efficiency as compared to expert checkers.